Attention Developers

When I first started to become aware of the cloud computing movement, I remember being intrigued but not all that aware of its possible consequences to me. After all, I was a developer not a systems administrator, so other than professional curiosity why was cloud computing all that important to me? Maybe you are a developer that can see right through my early, naive perception of cloud computing, but maybe you are a developer that, like me in the early going, doesn't quite see why cloud computing should matter to you. In the case of the latter, I've come to realize that there are several reasons why cloud computing matters to the developer. Let me try to sum up a few of those reasons for you here.

Reason #1: Developer services can be delivered via the cloudThere are many different types of services that can be realized from a cloud (public, private, or hybrid) that could have a large impact on the way developers work. As I mention in a previous post, IBM announced a Tools as a Service initiative in which IDEs are made available within a public cloud. IDEs in the cloud give developers a single development environment that can be accessed from any machine at any time. Better yet, we don't have to worry with installing and maintaining the environment. In addition to IDEs in the cloud, with the increased focus on virtualization and virtualization management that cloud is bringing, the ability to rapidly procure and instantiate runtime environments should become standard practice. This means that new ideas and new product code can be rapidly prototyped and tested. No longer should a proof of concept be delayed because it couldn't be proven in a runtime environment.

Reason #2: Cloud computing means a world of new products and offeringsAs a developer, it is a continuous battle to keep up with constantly emerging technologies, but it is imperative that we do so in order to ensure we take full advantage of available solutions. Cloud computing providers introduce a whole new world of service offerings for consumption by application developers. Cloud providers are offering new storage solutions, new database implementations, new content distribution mechanisms, new application integration capabilities, etc. As developers who may potentially be writing applications that run in the cloud, these new offerings directly affect the code we write. We need to educate ourselves about these new services, and we should understand when these solutions can be best leveraged to deliver our end product.

Reason #3: SOA becomes more importantOkay, so maybe this is not aimed squarely at the developer, but I know many times a developer wears the hat of architect as well... even if they don't know it! In a cloud computing world, the applications and services we deploy to the cloud should align and fit into our SOA. This is critical if we are to fully exploit the benefits of ubiquity offered by the cloud. Cloud computing inherently provides the ability to access services from any machine with a network connection, automatically giving the kind of service ubiquity sought by many companies. By developing these services in a SOA-compliant manner, we extend the reach by making it more readily consumable by other application components. We move beyond pure end-user applications and services, and in doing so new or increased revenue streams may be realized for the service.

These are just a few of the ways I see cloud computing currently affecting the developer's role. There are a myriad of reasons that developers should be cognizant of cloud computing, and I expect the list of reasons to boom as cloud computing continues to advance. I'd also like to hear what you think about cloud computing and the developer, so post a comment below if you would like to join the discussion.